Dancing on the Square

About the program

Young Friends,

Come and dance with us! We’d like to see lots of you in Heroes’ Square (Hősök tere) on 18 June. Please give a warm welcome to the choreographers: they will help you practice our joint performance. May I ask you to include Roma and non-Roma in each of your groups. Let this event demonstrate that we live together and appreciate each other. Let’s show everyone that we can create something together and enjoy it. We are sending you Mendelssohn’s beautiful music – listen to it a lot and practice your dance moves often. Let’s have a great festive night! I can hardly wait for 18 June to come.

With all best wishes,

Ivan Fischer

Conductor Iván Fischer and musicians of the Budapest Festival Orchestra are planning a unique concert in Hungary to take place on 18 June 2015 on Heroes’ Square in Budapest, for which we are now searching for partner schools and children aged between 12 and 16 living in difficult circumstances who are keen on music and dance.

In the summer of 2015 the world-class orchestra is going to play the incidental music to Mendelssohn’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream on one of the most important and beautiful squares in Budapest, while two hundred underprivileged children from all around the country dance together combining the elements of hip-hop, contemporary and folk dance.

Dancing together teaches you to listen to and take care of each other and discover the beauty of classical music. As José Antonio Abreu, founder of the El Sistema music education programme in Venezuela, put it: “Music has the ability to unite an entire community, and to express sublime feelings.” The programme, with a history more than three decades’ long, began in an underground parking garage, and is now offering free and intense music education for several thousands of children mainly from very poor backgrounds.

Similarly, the Budapest Festival Orchestra would like to share the experience of mutual dance and the lesser known classical music with young people for free, in return for which we only ask children to spare some time and enthusiasm. They do not need to have a history of musical or dancing education, they only need to be open and cheerful.

Participating children will be given dance lessons at their local schools once a week from February till June by professional choreographers. The leading choreographer of the production is Harangozó-Award winner Bertalan Vári. The training of the children and their travel along with their parents and teachers to Budapest will be fully financed by the Festival Orchestra.